Authors: Steve Sem-Sandberg
were howling and from somewhere they heard a noise as if a large bulldozer were hard at work. It was only afterwards that he realised the demolition noise came from buildings that collapsed and burnt. The prison itself seemed not to be hit. Where the suffocating dust was coming from was a mystery. Viktor Zobel was the first to move. He took off the dirty bandage that he kept wrapped around the sore on his leg, the bad one that he used to rub with margarine, and tore the strip of cloth into pieces that he wetted under the tap and handed out to as many of them as possible. With the filthy, wet cloths pressed against their noses and mouths, they made it down the stairs and out into the street. The dawn was more unreal than any he had ever seen: inflamed and red behind a plume of black smoke still rising from the ruins of the station building. Further away, in the marshalling yard, freight trucks were also burning and giving off more black plumes. Sirens howled all the time, by now from fire engines and ambulances that kept arriving and spewing out firemen, nurses and soldiers. No one took much notice of them at first. It took several hours before a police officer ordered them to go back to their cells but he obviously couldn’t be bothered with the gang of dirty, poorly clothed young men watching from outside the cordon. They were a distraction, no more. From then on, the guards stopped locking the cell doors. The assumption seemed to be that they might as well stay there for their own safety. One morning, the tray with bread and water that used to be placed outside the cell door was not there. The prisoners conferred for a while and then decided to send one of them off to reconnoitre. After a quarter of an hour or so, the scout returned, shouting and waving and very agitated. The Negroes are here, he shouted, the Negroes! The others followed him nervously. The prison seemed abandoned and there was not a guard in sight. Outside the main entrance, a jeep stood parked, and inside it sat four
men in unidentifiable uniforms. Only one of the four, a man sitting next to the driver, was actually black. The two in the back of the jeep were talking all the time but the black man in the front seat smiled and waved and handed out cigarettes. Adrian took one and the Negro lit it for him, protecting the flame with his cupped hand, which was white on the inside as if the blackness had been painted on. What’s your name? he asked but Adrian didn’t know, or perhaps he didn’t understand the question.
Under a Bombed Sky
Fear infiltrated the sky, a sky either threateningly blue or else hidden behind pale, impenetrable winter mists, and the radio broadcasts of meaningless symphony concerts might at any time be interrupted by the official air-raid warnings of unidentified bomber formations approaching from the south, always read by a young woman whose cool voice, like the off-white haze in the winter sky, seemed to lack form and clarity. In February 1945, not a day passed without cuckoo calls sounding, and the well-spoken woman dutifully enumerating positions of the enemy planes, their direction of travel and likely destination, and sometimes Anna Katschenka could not get to work because everyone in the block had to hurry down to the shelters and then stay there for hours, waiting until the anti-aircraft batteries had stopped their devastating counter-attacks and the distant, diffuse buzz of the Allied planes was no longer heard. They sensed the hits only as bursts of low-frequency vibration in the ground but the smoke from the fires could linger for hours until the wind finally drove it away in another direction. Her father and brother had been ordered to join the civil defence force as part of the Volkssturm that Hitler had commanded as the last front against the advancing Soviet army. Her father’s age and increasingly confused mind in no way counted as reasons for exemption. Her brother patrolled Südbahnhof as an air-raid warden and sometimes, when they were short of people, he was recruited to help with loading boxes of weapons, grenades and tank-gun ammunition onto
the lorries ferrying goods non-stop to the front. Katschenka couldn’t sleep during the nights her brother was on duty. She lay awake, listening to the steady ticking of the clock. Behind the blackout blinds, the night was like a single, huge structure about to fall apart. Everything was collapsing, even the everyday reality that had always surrounded her and she had taken for granted. The truth was that nothing seemed real to her anymore: not the wall in her ‘girl’s room’, which was still hers though she now thought its striped wallpaper too colourful, too vulgar; not her mother’s hysterical plea that they must agree on a safe place to hide jewellery and table silver now that the Bolsheviks were coming; not the patch of pale sky appearing in a previously solid row of houses one morning after another night spent in the shelter. The Allied bombing seemed to be aimed mainly at strategic targets such as factories, harbours and oil refineries but, more often than not, bombs also detonated in residential areas. Where whole city blocks had been hit and reduced to chaotic piles of splintered wood and broken masonry, the exposed areas of sky looked as cold and grey as if they had never seen sunlight. It could be almost impossible to make your way to work after a day-long air raid. The trams, when they finally turned up, would be crammed and some desperate passengers would cling on to the outside. On 21 February, after a massive bombardment, the trams didn’t run at all and she had to walk to the hospital. The burnt-out shell of a 52 tram had been abandoned on Mariahilfer Strasse. On its scorched roof, bits of the trolley stuck out like the broken ribs of an umbrella. Opposite it, the entire façade of an office building had been ripped off and the shell that remained looked as if scooped out with a giant spoon. In front of the street-level row of shops, odds and ends of stock were mixed with other debris: crushed bits of furniture, lengths of fabric and torn pieces of paper. Sometimes, the debris from ruined
buildings formed obstacles so massive it was impossible to get round them, and people on foot had to walk along narrow corridors inside the heaps. When it rained, or when darkness fell (there was no electricity), she felt as if she had left her familiar cityscape for another, countrified place where she had to find her way along cattle tracks made dangerous by hard tree roots and treacherous puddles of mud. Many of the hospital staff used the constant air raids as an excuse for not coming to work at all. Nurse Kragulj, for instance, was absent three days running and blamed it on caring for her sister who had been hurt falling down the stairs. Hilde Mayer was the only one who always punctual but it was easier for her who had been allocated a service flat on the other side of Sanatoriumstrasse when she nursed at Steinhof. Anna Katschenka kept a record of all lost hours at work and ran a tight ship generally. Shoes worn outside must be cleaned, dirty clothing kept in designated cupboards or hung up outside, and exposed parts of the body cleaned and disinfected. As both the electricity and water supplies often broke down for long periods, they had to get used to working in the light of candles and sooty paraffin lamps. The cold air inside the buildings chilled their joints and numbed their fingers but the worst deprivation was lack of water. The toilets hadn’t been flushed for weeks and the stench was becoming unbearable. They worked together to carry water in buckets and basins until the bathtubs were filled, then pumped out the excrement and cleaned the toilets with floor soap. There were, Lord be praised, diesel-fuelled generators, but they couldn’t supply enough for the whole institution, so pavilion 17 was closed and the remaining children transferred to number 15. This move meant that Pelikan’s world went to pieces. Even moving away from a wall he had made his own troubled him. The new door he had to watch felt all wrong and, at first, he crawled around on all fours, rubbing
his belly against the floor like an anxious dog. Anna Katschenka observed him with amazement. The boy had grown almost half a metre in just a few years and his movements were now so clumsy and awkward that he was a worse obstacle than ever. One morning, when Cläre Kleinschmittger simply could not get past him with the ward drug-trolley, she jammed her elbow in his midriff and then slapped his smarmy face.
Give it a rest, won’t you!
she said.
They’ll be here soon enough
. And so said aloud what they all thought but didn’t dare to say. Although Nurse Kleinschmittger was trembling with distaste and anger, it was she and not Pelikan who looked beaten.
They?
Who were they? What would it be like when
they
came? Kleinschmittger was frightened. They were all frightened.
*
The Blind
One afternoon in early April, one of the grey patient-transport buses from Gemeinnützige Krankentransport stopped in front of the institution and two social care workers climbed out, a man and a woman. They were followed by a large number of older children, all carrying small suitcases and neatly dressed in shorts or skirts, and grey or dark brown jackets. Some of the children stayed by the bus while others, seemingly confused, set out in different directions. Anna Katschenka couldn’t understand why neither of the two carers did anything to gather them together. Then it came to her: these children were not normally sighted. Doctors Krenek and Illing had gone to meet the new arrivals and were talking to the carers. The children, not all of whom were blind – some were deaf or deaf-mute, and some could neither see nor hear – looked remarkably well nourished, at least compared to the children in the neurological clinic. They were almost all quite well, apart from a few cases of ringworm and a girl of eleven who had hepatitis and was brought later in a separate transport. The reform school was to take in the healthy
ones and the clinic had to house the rest. Preferably, they should be kept together in the same ward, Illing decided, since it would make it easier to keep an eye on them. When Katschenka began to say something about the shortage of beds, Illing said that pavilion 17 was to be brought back into use and the new children placed there. Katschenka didn’t know where the blind and deaf children came from, or what the point was of transferring them to Spiegelgrund. Though, as Hilde Mayer suggested, it wasn’t too hard to figure out the answer to the last question – presumably, they were running from the Bolsheviks, just like everyone else. They cleared a former day room on the first floor and put the ill children there. During these last, desperate couple of weeks, wild and contradictory rumours started up everywhere. Some said the Soviets had been seen just ten or twenty kilometres to the south-east of Wien, some that the Germans were mounting a successful counter-offensive and had driven the enemy out. One day, Doctor Illing addressed all the staff. It was essential, he said, that they loyally carried out their duties, until the very last hour, as he put it. As he spoke, he kept pacing up and down with his characteristic swagger. His hands were clasped behind his back and the brown tobacco smile never left his face, as if to cheer them up and instil confidence, but something hard and knotted lingered in his face which contradicted every word he said even though he afterwards continued with his rounds and still issued orders about which children should receive the ‘treatment’ or stay under observation. But where would the staff come from? Kragulj simply didn’t turn up for work now. Nobody knew where she had disappeared to. The next day, Erna Storch also failed to arrive. Katschenka eventually found out that Nurse Erna had gone off to join her husband in Reichenberg. They recruited staff from pavilion 3 and from pavilions that had been converted to care for patients from other hospitals which,
like Rosenheim for instance, had had to evacuate part of their premises. Marta Fried, a young nurse of barely twenty, was recruited from pavilion 3. Nurse Marta knew perfectly well where she had ended up. She was as white as a sheet and her slender, pale hands were shaking but she didn’t dare to say anything when Katschenka instructed her about the daily routines. Doctor Türk and Sister Katschenka went together to visit the blind children in one of Krenek’s pavilions and were met by the bright, happy chatter of children’s voices. Katschenka couldn’t recall if she had ever heard children laugh in there. The carers had been given rooms in the same pavilion, and it was obvious that the children relied on these two for everything. If the weather was good enough, they were allowed to play outside for a few hours every day. They were always very disciplined about it and lined up in the corridor outside the dormitory, just as they did when they had to go to the shelters. One afternoon, when Sister Katschenka went into the empty dormitory, one boy of about eleven was still there. He couldn’t see her and couldn’t have known who she was, but he stretched his arms up to show her that he needed help to get his sweater off. Anna was reminded of the little boy in Totzenbach, whom Jekelius had lifted up into the pear tree where other giggling children already perched. That boy had made just the same gesture, helpless and trusting at the same time. That day, Doctor Jekelius had instructed her that reality had only two dimensions: existing blindly or exercising the will in order to control existence. He had gone on to say that it meant there were only two kinds of people, the rulers and those who submit to the rulers. But it came to her that there was a third kind, who gazed past you and everything else and seemed able to walk through walls. Pelikan had taken up a post by the door where he showed off and bowed, and beamed at the visually impaired children who were housed in his ward. Not that they would have looked
his way even if their eyes had been functioning normally. They were living in a world of their own, enclosed and inaccessible to outsiders. All the time she spent in the company of the blind children, she had a feeling that their presence was some kind of omen. As if they had been sent on a mission. By whom, or with what message, she never quite understood. Perhaps, it once struck her, they were the seeing ones and she, Anna Katschenka, was blind. Then, the meaning of their presence was simply to remind her of this.
*
Extramural
The jaundiced girl had been placed in isolation in one of the single rooms off the ground-floor corridor. The door was to be kept closed at all times and no one from the institution was allowed to visit. One morning, when Sister Katschenka passed the sickroom door, it stood open. People were talking inside the room, one in a childish voice that was the blind girl’s and another a grown-up voice that the ward sister soon recognised. As she stepped closer to the door, she sensed that they had not heard her. The blind girl’s bed took up almost all of the space in the narrow former cell. At the head end, Hedwig Blei was seated, leaning forward with both hands on the girl’s, which rested on top of the coverlet. Nurse Hedwig was either speaking or singing – her voice was very low – and the girl was listening to whatever it was with wide-open eyes and a smile on her lips. After a little while, the blind girl startled and turned her empty, unseeing eyes towards Katschenka. The girl’s smile grew rigid. Nurse Blei fell silent but didn’t turn round. So far, only the blind child had ‘seen’ her. It made her feel distinctly uneasy. Why are you not on duty? she said straight out, very loudly, as if to shut up someone who had spoken out of turn. Nurse Hedwig stayed very still and didn’t even look around. I can only assume that when you’re really needed you will also be unavailable, Sister Katschenka said. She had intended
it to sound mildly sarcastic though it came across as merely resigned. Blei noticed it. I have no intention to make myself unavailable at any time, she said in a low voice. Not for as long as children are here. Then she got up, still without a glance at Sister Katschenka, and left. Later that afternoon, Hilde Mayer revealed that they were busy burning documents – correspondence and patients’ case notes – in the boiler in the office basement. Not long now before the Bolsheviks will be panting down the back of our necks, she added. A quite unreasonable fear for her family spread inside Katschenka. When she finally came home, several hours later, her father stood within earshot of the mumbling radio, as was his habit. Her mother sat on the armchair with the blue dustcover. Why so late? her mother asked and fixed her familiar, blank gaze on her daughter. Supper has been ready for a long time. Anna didn’t know what to say. Her mother’s accusatory, stony face and the incessantly ticking clock on the chest of drawers were both measures of the depth of the silence that filled the room.